Sort of amazing, sort of baffling: Is this restaurant seriously serving raw cookie dough and charging $8 for it?

Homemade chocolate chip cookies reward you for giving up. They're somehow even better when they're raw, stuck to the side of a bowl. Every kid under the age of 15 knows this—and apparently so do the chefs at Willa Jean in New Orleans and Little Donkey in Boston.

At both restaurants, the banner dessert is a hunk of chocolate chip cookie dough stuck between a beater and served on a plate. It evokes a memory of sneaking licks from a mixing spoon while grandma isn't looking. But wait: Is this restaurant seriously serving me raw cookie dough and charging me $8 for it?

Yes, that's a real thing—and, yes, it's worth it (and not at all like eating half a tube of slice-and-bake dough).

Pasty chef Kelly Fields knew she wanted cookies and milk on the menu before Willa Jean (a Top 50 finalist!) even opened in 2015. She bought beaters in bulk and approached her teammates. She still wanted to serve fully formed cookies with melty chocolate chips, but she also wanted to capture what she remembers the process of baking as a kid to be like. "My mom made cookies all the time growing up, and when I realized she was baking, I knew I needed to stand by and be ready for the dough," she said. "Stealing the beater from my siblings was the experience for me."

It took Fields close to two years of baking cookies every day to perfect her recipe, but she finally landed on using five different kinds of Valrhona chocolate (her mom used to shave a Hershey's chocolate bar). The dish appears with hot, baked-to-order cookies; a beater full of raw dough (the eggs are pasteurized to stave off any worries diners may have about raw eggs); and a small glass of Tahitian vanilla milk.

Chef Ken Oringer of Little Donkey thought what Fields did was brilliant—and wanted to pay homage to the dish on his own menu when his restaurant opened earlier in July. The Little Donkey riff is raw chocolate chip cookie dough (also with pasteurized eggs) served with milk foam made from condensed milk, whole milk, and sea salt. Then, it's topped with cocoa nibs and fleur de sel. Like Willa Jean, the dish is presented on a beater; unlike the original, there are no baked cookies to accompany the dough.

"I've always thought the dough was the best part," he said. "But the thing about cookie dough is that everybody loves it but nobody has the guts to just put it on a menu as cookie dough."

Admittedly, one of the reasons it's even on the menu at Little Donkey is because there isn't a pastry team, or a pastry chef, or really even enough ovens to bake pastries during service. According to Oringer, it was either the raw cookie dough or an uncooked fruit dessert, and the latter seemed lame.

His version has baking soda, but no baking powder or vanilla extract, and Oringer confessed, "I don't know how it would come out as a cookie." The important part was to focus on the dough. It touches on powerful childhood memories for him, memories that he is re-experiencing with his own kids who eat dough right off the mixer at home.

Thinking back on that initial discussion with her teammates, Fields remembered asking whether they thought people would get it. This was back in 2014, and one of her colleagues responded, as if it was the simplest calculus in the world: "If you do it, and it works, it might become one of the most Instagrammed desserts of all time."